The day I was 'kidnapped' by Elton John

A no-holds-barred biography of Britain's favourite pop star will be the year's most startling entertainment read. Author Chris Heath has spent years in Williams's world and saw his binge-driven adventures. Here the singer tells how a cry for help brought more support than he wanted

The day I was 'kidnapped' by Elton John

A no-holds-barred biography of Britain's favourite pop star will be the year's most startling entertainment read. Author Chris Heath has spent years in Williams's world and saw his binge-driven adventures. Here the singer tells how a cry for help brought more support than he wanted

Saturday 28 August 2004 20.27 EDT
First published on Saturday 28 August 2004 20.27 EDT

On the plane to Austria, Robbie reads in various newspapers that he is appearing in the play One Night Only ('Bollocks,' he points out), that he has 'made no secret of his desire to act' ('Bollocks'), that he has taken acting lessons at the Lee Strasberg Institute ('Bollocks') and that he was recently seen driving down the M1 with his father ('Bollocks'). He tosses them away: 'I'll have to tell you the Elton John kidnapping story...

'I got a pang of guilt not long ago,' says Rob. 'Elton tried to do a lot for me and I didn't thank him enough.' Pause. 'But what he did was really weird.'

To understand fully the Elton John kidnapping story, an earlier episode must first be described. Take That had split the year before and Rob had just broken up with his girlfriend at the time, Jacqui Hamilton-Smith. His first solo hit, 'Freedom', had been out, but he was yet to find any stability or direction in his life.

'So I was in a right pickle anyway,' he remembers, 'and I'd just been through the worst year for drug intake that I ever had - 1995/96. I woke up one afternoon after being up all night and I knew I was fucked, you know. My bedroom was a pigsty and there were about four bowls of cornflakes dried up with cigarette butts in all of them, and that's how my head felt. Natural instinct kicked in to save myself and I opened my Filofax and went: "Right ..."'

He flicked through the pages and saw Elton John's number. They'd met when Rob was in Take That and he had been to stay a couple of times with Elton.

'Elton was very nice and a gracious host and very supportive of us and lovely,' Rob says. The visits also planted the idea in Rob's head that Elton might be a good man to call when you were in this kind of mess.

'I rang up and I just went,' "I need help",' he says. 'Elton was in Atlanta, and he said, "Go to my house". So I went to his house in Windsor. I'd sort of thought that I'd wanted to get clean or stop drinking - little did I realise that I hadn't really had enough, and probably wouldn't have enough for another five years. And Elton made sure that I was all right at his house and sent me a care package over - loads of Nike stuff in a box. I hadn't brought any clothes with me and I'd put weight on and I looked a dreadful mess and I felt awful.'

He spent two weeks there, 'drying out and pottering around, rattling around Elton's big house'. Elton called every day to see how he was. He also called Beechy Colclough, the therapist who has become semi-famous as a celebrity addiction specialist and media pundit. This, Rob would come to see as less of a gift.

'He came and made me his case for that two weeks. But he did an awful lot of weird things.' One of the first things Colclough said to him was: 'You see this watch - Elton bought me that,' and for Rob that coloured everything.

But, that aside, he had reached out to Elton John when he was desperate and Elton had been there for him. 'It was such a nice thing for him to do,' says Rob. 'Such an amazing thing for him to do. But I didn't feel good enough and felt intimidated by it all. The upshot of it is, Elton's really, really generous, really wanting me to be well, and I really, really thank him for it.'

Nonetheless, after two weeks, Rob left and stepped back on to the same merry-go-round. 'I must have decided that I was bored,' he says, 'and I decided that now I was well enough to go and batter myself over the head again, which I subsequently did.'

Nine months later...

I've found Guy [Chambers - his songwriting partner], we've written the album, I'm in the studio, I'm in a very, very bad way, you know. And I was supposed to hook up with Elton one afternoon to play him the tracks we've been doing, and this was a week before I was going to rehab. I'd got a week to finish four vocals, I think it was. I know for a fact that one was 'Lazy Days', I know one was 'Angels', I can't remember the other two. I've already tried to sing 'Lazy Days', I've already tried 'Angels' and, frankly, it just wasn't good enough. You can see, there's video footage of me singing it and I'm drinking red wine out of the bottle as I'm singing it - that's the reason why it wasn't good enough. So, I was supposed to go and play Elton these songs.

I wake up in Notting Hill, and I'm on my way to the studio in Fulham Road, in a black cab, calling at maybe five pubs on the way, with the car waiting outside. Lager. pints. In the end I pulled up at the pub opposite Chelsea's ground, and with the studio in eyeshot I just stayed in the pub and got pissed with some people that were working on the Chelsea Village - builders. We played pool and I got fucking hammered. And then I got to the studio, walked in and fell asleep under the mixing desk. Woke up, took the tape, after doing no work, and went to Elton's house. Five or six o'clock, maybe later - it was in summer, it may have been seven or eight o'clock.

So I walk through his door - not in Windsor, his pad in London - and I've got this tape in my hand and I'm pissed...' [Rob acts out the wobbling and the slurring.] ... "I've got this to play you!" And he went, "Do you want a drink?" And I said, "I'll have a spritzer." Because spritzer at the time was the drink that I was drinking that wasn't alcohol. I'd drink spritzer because it's less fattening and there's no alcohol in it. Yeah, you figure it out.

But I can't detox today...

And Elton had a tear in his eye looking at me, and I saw his tear and I started to cry too. You know. And he went, "You've got to go to rehab right now." And I went: "I know." And I started to cry and he started to cry. And he said, "I'm going to organise it," and I went, "OK," so he's off on the phone. As he's phoning, I go in and go, "I've got to finish the album. I've got to finish the album." And he said, "You're going to die - you need to go now." So there was lots of to-ing and fro-ing with me going, "I can't go, nobody knows where I am, people'll be worried about me and I've got an album to finish."

So after to-ing and fro-ing and crying every time that he said, "You've got to go," I got in a car with David Furnish, Elton got in his car and we drove to Windsor. So I'm in this car, on my way to Windsor, one half of me's really happy because somebody's looking after me, the other half is really fucking petrified a) because I've got to finish an album, b) because I'm going to rehab anyway, and c) no one knows where I am. So we get to Elton's and I can remember really realising the situation that I was in as I was eating some food, realising that I was terribly pissed when I arrived at Elton's, it wasn't a good idea, and in the morning I'll wake up and I'll say: "Thank you very much for helping me. I've got a terrible hangover, but there's things that I need to do before I go to rehab."

So I went to bed, and that's what I was thinking: "In the morning I'll apologise profusely." Because I was already fucking full of guilt and embarrassment. I'm lying on the bed and I hear, "Rob! Rob!" and I open one eye and I just see five sets of legs. I see riding boots, jodhpurs, and this is me hungover and I don't know where I am, and it's David Furnish and it's Elton and it's three men I don't know, and they're all looking at me. And I think: "Oh fuck, I've really done it now."

I was told that this was Dr such-and-such, this is Mr such-and-such and this is Mr such-and-such. One was from the detox clinic.

So we all go downstairs and we're sat in Elton's main room on these two massive sofas facing each other. I'm on one sofa by myself and the rest are all sat opposite me, and Elton's perched on the side. And, bless him, to all intents and purposes there was a lot of sense in what he was doing and he thought he was doing me a favour.

And in many ways he was. But I'm going: "Look, I can't go into detox today and I can't go to rehab - I've got vocals to finish." And I'm doing this and I'm going like that ...' [Rob acts out how his arms are crossed, folded within each other, his fingers fiddling with the outside of his arms] '... and one of them went, "Well, you've got cocaine psychosis now - that's a symptom, what you're doing there." And reluctantly, because I could see the sense in going to rehab now, I went off to the detox clinic.

It was a burgundy-coloured Citroën that we got in, and there was David and Elton at the door of his house, waving. There were two people in the back of the car sandwiching me in, the other was driving and the front seat was free. Presumably so that I wouldn't try to commit suicide or run off. So I'm looking out the back of this Citroën, waving to Elton, who's got one hand over his mouth, and David waving. God bless 'em. And off we went into London.

I hadn't got a clue where we were going, I didn't know what a detox centre was. I didn't know particularly why I had to go there. And I didn't know what was happening to me. So off we went into London, into the centre and then over the water. I found myself at this big private clinic opposite this war memorial with two cannons - that's all I can remember.

I walked in and the receptionist looks up at me, and they were so snooty in there, you know, so very, very snooty. I can remember her looking at me like I was shit, and me having to sign my name, and off we went upstairs. And my room's got bars on the windows and outside the window is just a brick wall about four feet away from the window. I sit on my bed, and it's one of those beds with the plastic on so you don't piss yourself. And in reality I'd just got a massive hangover. That's what I was having.

Heroin, Ecstasy and coke...

When I did eventually go to rehab I didn't detox, I didn't take any pills. I didn't get the DTs, they didn't have to wean me off anything, I'd just got a problem with my drinking. But here I'd just drank too much and I'd accumulated a massive hangover. So I sat down and this rather stern, big... not a Hattie Jacques kind of character ... she comes in and I'm really treated like I'm a naughty, naughty boy. Really naughty. There's no love or care or, "You're going to be cool, everything's cool, you're in the right place." There was none of that at all. They said, "Write down what you're addicted to," so I wrote it all down, everything that I'd ever taken - heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, amyl nitrate, speed. And England were playing Poland that day and it was on Channel 5 and the hospital hadn't got Channel 5. Now there was no way I was going to stay after that - that was the straw that broke the camel's back. But in the meantime they'd given me a liquid cosh. So now I'm trying to get out of this detox centre...

Robbie called a friend, who turned up with Robbie's therapist and got him out. Rob went and got some sushi and then watched the football and fell asleep. 'And I felt so happy that I could finish the album, not die, and go to rehab,' he remembers. And then, the following week, once he had finished recording the album and had one monumental final bender in the studio, he headed off to the rehab he wanted to be in, Clouds in Wiltshire.

Outside his house there were a few paparazzi and one film crew. 'I'm actually quite upset,' Rob told them. 'When Michael Barrymore went to rehab there was thousands of you outside his house.'

After a brief stop at Stonehenge, he checked into Clouds and started to get healthy. There were no TV or radio or tabloids there, but there were copies of the broadsheets, and one day he was astonished to pick one up and read, in an article about him, 'Robbie Williams, who lists his addictions as...', and the list appeared just as he had written it going into the first detox centre.

'All's I can say is this, is that on the road to getting well and on the road to trying to sort my life out, there's an awful lot of fucking charlatans out there, and they're sick, and they are actually dealing with sick people that actually genuinely want to be well, and it boils my fucking blood,' summarises Rob. 'I'm sure that does happen to other people, and I'm sure they die.'

'So, from that,' he says, [ending the 'kidnap' episode] 'Elton sort of tried to do what he thought was best, and obviously came from a very loving place. But the whole thing for me is tarnished with the lack of professionalism, even though Elton came from a place of love.'

They haven't really spoken since. About a year later Elton wanted him to do a duet on an album that already had the Backstreet Boys and LeAnn Rimes on it, and Rob declined. 'Anything near a boy band I didn't want to be associated with because I was desperately trying to break away from it, so I said I didn't want to do it. I think it really upset him.'